Angry Little Men

Did I ever mention the time I was held up at an ATM by a dwarf in a wheelchair? I think you would have remembered this story if I had told it to you. This was years ago when ATMs were fairly new. (I had a friend in New York who sold pot and he could not believe that people could actually get cash in the middle of the night. Changed his whole life.) But ATMs are one of those creations, like the computer, that are sort of good and sort of bad. So I'm getting my twenty dollars out of the machine and I hear this little voice behind me demanding me to "Give me your money!" And I turn around and there is a dwarf in a wheelchair holding a knife. He said it again and I looked at him like he was crazy and I grabbed the knife out of his tiny little hand! Then I scolded him and told him that if he kept this up someone was going to kill him and he got real angry and started swearing and I just walked to my car while he shouted obscenities at me and told me give him back his knife. And I did because I figured a little man out there alone at night needs some protection but I didn't give him the twenty because I thought he should learn a lesson.

And then I started thinking about anger. People ask me all the time..."Aren't you angry?" And most of the time I am not angry. But you know when I seem to get really, really angry? When I am all relaxed and lying in the corpse pose at the end of a yoga class. Oh my God am I pissed off lying there. For some reason when I am all relaxed is the time I want to kill someone. Keep me busy and I am calm as a cucumber. But give me a few downward dogs and a bridge pose and I'm ready to strangle...Everybody. Truthfully, though, why should I be angry? Because the man formerly known as my husband left me a year ago a few weeks after my son went to college and two days after my play opened and six months after our dog died and nine months after my father died and he went to Paris with his new girlfriend and he wasn't here when I was diagnosed with cancer so I had sit in the room by myself and listen to Dr. Hertz tell me that I had a tumor and I had to drive home by myself and absorb the information and go through all the chemo and make all the plans for when I'm in the hospital and deal with the exploding toilet that leaked into the hallway so I now have to replace the flooring one week before my surgery and my car needs a tune-up and my life as I knew it is all different and I have to go through a divorce and I have to move and I have to learn how to eat little bits because my stomach is going to be smaller and I am little overwhelmed and that dwarf is so lucky that I didn't run into him today................WHY SHOULD ALL OF THAT MAKE ME ANGRY?!!! It's all just little obstacles that are thrown in one's path and can be dealt with. I do not live in Darfur and I was not in a massive earthquake in Peru. Wait a minute, what if THE BIG ONE hits when I'm having my surgery? Oh, that's just what I need. Then I WILL be angry. But at whom? God? Is there such a thing? Hard to accept that when you see so much suffering. But luckily if the Big One hits while I'm being sliced in two I will be peacefully unconscious. Hopefully, the surgeon will be conscious and not hit by falling debris.

But hey, I'm not angry. If I was a dwarf in a wheelchair I might be angry. But just don't try and talk to me after a yoga class.